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Google Summer of Code meetup in New Delhi

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

Google Summer of Code meetups are a great way for students to spread the word about how the program works and meet fellow open source enthusiasts. If you are interested in holding a meetup at your University, please visit our FAQ page for more information.

On August 23rd, the Jamia Millia Islamia Linux User Group (JMILUG) hosted a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) meetup at Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi. The meetup was an opportunity to learn from past and present GSoC students who have actively contributed to open source projects all over the world. The meetup also provided great information for budding developers who are ready to get their hands dirty and contribute to real world projects.

Over the last two years, nine JMILUG members have participated in GSoC. We felt it was time to give back to both the Indian GSoC students and open source community. We started accepting proposals from potential speakers for the event a couple of months before the meetup. Proposals were subject to a voting process through a website we built and speakers from the top voted sessions were called to give a talk.

The event was incredibly popular — we received over 250 registrations! We decided to move to a bigger venue and were able to accommodate everyone that was interested. On the day of the meet-up, we were pleased to welcome student participants from all academic levels and backgrounds.

The Google Open Source Programs Office graciously provided pens and t-shirts for the event. To make the speaker sessions more interactive, we distributed the goodies based on participation in a Q&A session after each talk. This also ensured that attendees listened intently to each speaker.

In total we had seven speakers give talks during the day-long event. Topics ranged from Angular.js to web accessibility. The final session of the day was dedicated to the topic “Getting into GSoC”. A high point was inviting all current GSoC participants on stage and having them share details about their experience and answer questions from the audience.

We wrapped up the day by distributing attendance certificates to speakers and t-shirts to the two most active audience members. Later, a lottery round was conducted and two people were selected randomly from the audience to be awarded another pair of GSoC T-shirts.

We hope that the meetup will attract many new students to GSoC and the world of open source coding. A big thanks to all of our speakers and attendees!

By Vipul Nayyar, GSoC participant in 2013 and 2014 and Umar Ahmad, GSoC participant in 2014Google Summer of Code 2015 has just been announced! For more information please visit our program website.